The wreckage appeared an hour before dawn, just as Se’Saera had said.
Beneath the last of the moonlight, it was not at first clear what had caused the ship to wreck. The rocky beach stretched around the broken hull like the jaws of a giant animal, itself torn apart by the act of destruction on the vessel. The imagery lingered in Bueralan’s mind as he rowed through the choppy surf to the wreckage and grew stronger when, near to the broken hull, Aela Ren reached into the black water and pulled out a limb. It was a man’s arm, brown-skinned and thick with fat and muscle quickly going to rot. In the pale light, the Innocent turned the limb over in his own brown, scarred hands without revulsion. As he did, Bueralan brought the small dinghy along the ship’s shattered bow, turning around the broken edges to gaze at the front that had been torn out, as if by the teeth similar in size to the rocks that lay in the water before the hole.
It was in that wreckage that Ren lashed a rope to a beam to hold the dinghy in place. After he attached it, the small man disappeared into the dark of the hull, leaving Bueralan to pull the oars in and follow him. As the saboteur stepped onto the deck, a match sparked and a lamp that sat on the ground bloomed, the light slowly revealing the bodies of men and women across the broken deck.
Each had been torn apart, ripped as if they were but raw meat.
‘Mercy,’ Bueralan whispered.
‘There is no mercy here.’ The Innocent lifted the lamp, the scars along his arms running back and forth like lit wires. ‘It is doubtful that there is mercy anywhere in the world, any more.’
Bueralan knelt beside one of the corpses, one close to the broken edge of the hull. There, he reached for the piece of silver that had caught his eye. ‘Mercy is the name of this ship.’ He pulled the small badge from the blood-slicked collar and held it up. ‘This is Captain Islan’s mark. This is her ship. She docks in Leviathan’s End.’
‘Leviathan’s End is not a nation,’ the other man said. ‘It has no fleets.’
‘Captain Islan is a mercenary.’ The badge had an empty flag beneath an undefined face. ‘All mercenaries call Leviathan’s End their home.’
‘Not all do. You know that as well as I do. But tell me—’ Ren’s lamp shone over a black-skinned woman, her body encased in black-and-red armour – ‘How did one of the First Queen’s soldiers come to be here?’
Bueralan stared at her face, the bone crushed and, in places, ripped away.
‘Do you know her?’ the Innocent asked.
‘No.’ He turned the badge over in his fingers and rose to his feet. ‘What could have torn off her face like that?’
‘A human hand.’
Bueralan wanted to disagree. As he examined the other bodies, he saw indents in the armour that had been made by hand, grooves that his hands could fit into. Despite his thoughts of a giant monster, it was clear that no such creature had attacked Mercy and dragged it to the shore. It had not been such a far-fetched thought: there were creatures that lived in the depths of Leviathan’s Blood that rose from the floor only to hunt the men and women who rode across its surface. It was not common, but when they did rise from the ocean bed to take a ship, they did so with long, clear tentacles that splintered hulls and decks. They crushed men and women and broke their bones as if they were nothing but a child’s toy before pulling them down into the water along with the ship. Over a decade ago, on the north of Gogair, Bueralan had seen exactly that. For weeks after, lone bodies had washed up against the shore, each of them a study in pain, but a pain that was not kin to what he saw now.
‘Three humans, to be exact.’ Aela Ren shone the light further down the hull. ‘Each of them clearly much stronger than a normal man or woman.’
‘Like you?’
‘Like us,’ he corrected.
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
When he turned, the glare of the lamp caught his skin, and the scars along his face ignited. It was as if the lasting impression of trauma that his god, Wehwe, had inflicted upon him at his death had broken through. ‘No. There are two men and one woman who are not with us,’ he said. ‘But the nature of the destruction is not theirs.’
Ahead, a part of the deck they stood on broke away, revealing the hold beneath. Both men approached the edge and, as Ren swung the lamp out far to light what was below, dozens of crates were revealed. Leviathan’s Blood had flooded most of the hold, but in that inky dark water, none of the crates floated. On them was a soldier bent at a terrible angle, with wood both around and through him, as if he had been the cause of the break in the deck, as if he had been slammed into it, then through it, before he crashed against the crates and tore them open. The jagged edges revealed silver and gold bars, bars that no one had made an effort to even try and loot.
‘Someone was fleeing,’ Bueralan murmured.
‘The First Queen was fleeing,’ Aela Ren said. ‘It could very well be that what Se’Saera saw in her dream was real.’
‘She said that we would swim to the ship,’ he said, unable to disagree with the other man fully, ‘but we did not.’
‘Quite true.’ Above them, the top deck of the ship groaned. ‘And she made no mention of those who caused this.’
The stairs that led onto Mercy were narrow and empty, and Bueralan followed the Innocent up them, his hand on the hilt of the sword the other had let him reclaim.
He was not sure what he expected to find at the end of the stairs, though he knew that there would be more dead. Indeed, the first thing that the light of Aela Ren’s lamp shone across was the broken body of a sailor. But it was not the debris of men and women that drew Bueralan’s gaze once the bloom of the lamp shone across the wide deck of Mercy like a piece of fallen sun. No, rather, it was the three figures that knelt on the deck, their heads bowed, and their arms folded across their chests that he turned towards.
Only one could be mistaken for human: two of them were so heavily deformed that Bueralan was surprised they were alive. Both wore water-soaked furs, indicating that they, at least, had swum onto the ship. The man to his right was the largest of the three, a huge, hulking figure: his flesh had split and been sewn back up with what appeared to be links of chain and wire. In contrast, the man to his left was leaner and taller, so much so that his skin was hollow and sunken, the outlines of his bones easily identifiable, as if he were a half-starved animal.
The last of the three had neither quality. Instead, he wore old leather armour, the design of it a layer of wrapping, with each individual length tightened around his white skin, turning it into a new, darker skin, one that shifted with him as he rose to his feet, as he held his leather-wrapped hands together and bowed his head. He had short blond hair that took on an almost white quality in the night and sat atop a smooth and unblemished face.
‘My Lord,’ he said in a voice that was soft, yet without kindness. ‘We await our god with one of the gifts she so desired. We await with it to beg forgiveness.’
It was then, as the man’s gaze rose, that Bueralan saw the woman’s body strung from one of Mercy’s masts.